How can an infographic get better? Add moving parts. Our fantastic design team created and designed this first gifographic from Express Writers. In it, we’re showing you the major tricks of the trade when it comes to writing and optimizing great SEO content. Tell us how you liked our first gifographic, and for a limited time, we’re taking gifographic orders! Full transcript below. Transcript
A Guide To Writing & Optimizing Great SEO Content (Gifographic)
Here’s Why Creating Great SEO Content Is So Crucial To Your Marketing
Web traffic drives content marketing. The largest portion of content marketing success, 63%, is derived from website traffic. A big reason why you should focus on having correctly SEO optimized content on your site.
2/3 of B2B Marketers say content fuels their marketing. And if your content is well-written, answers questions, and is optimized for your buyers to find it, buyers are willing to finish 57% of your buying process without even talking to a sales rep.
Google loves it! Google has said that quality content is key to rankings.
Google Panda is the gatekeeper. The Google panda update has been launched primarily to ensure only high quality content ranks the best. This Panda algorithm looks into factors specifically that include how expertly the content is written, the quality of the source and author, if it is original and not duplicate, authoritative, complete, well-researched, and not-over populated with ads.
Optimized blogs are powerful. 8 out of 10 Internet users are reading blogs and social media, which accounts for a whole 23% of time spent on the Internet.
3 Major Types of SEO Content & Tips on Correctly Optimizing Them
Content is the fuel for what you publish on the web. Here are a few of the most common web content types:
Web pages. Web pages are one of the most commonly optimized forms of SEO content. Boost your web page ranking through the inclusion of related, well-researched keywords, well written title tags, meta descriptions, awesome headers, and high quality writing. Never skimp on the quality of the writing if you want the best results from your web pages.
Blogs. There are approximately 152,000,000blogs on the web and with that kind of competition it’s obvious that optimizing your blog for SEO is an important way to get it to stand out. Include high quality citations (links) that reference any statistics you include and shoot for 2,000 words of high quality, well-researched SEO content per blog or more.
Product Descriptions. When it comes to writing product descriptions, you want people to be able to locate them online quickly and easily. Don’t skimp on copy here either. Include keywords in your product descriptions and write descriptive headlines and meta content for each one.
Social Media. Did you know that social media can be optimized, too? Except with social media, you optimize your content so that it can be located and shared by people rather than search engines. So don’t write around your keywords; write your social content around your audience.
3 Rules of Thumb in SEO Writing
1. Keyword Amount: Stay under a 3% keyword density in your content (web pages, blogs, etc.) Using them naturally is your #1 rule. Headers, subheaders, and throughout the copy are key areas to use them. How to Calculate:
Keyword Density = (How many times you used the keyword / Total words in the text) x 100
Example: (20 / 800) x 100 = 2.5% 2. Don’t count your keywords. We mean it! Think of your audience, the quality of your content, how well you’re researching the content, and if the copy addresses every question the topic could raise. This is far more important than counting keyword density every time. Simply optimize naturally with keywords. 3. Find original sources when you’re stating a claim, and citate (link to it). See our sources at the bottom of this infographic? Those are our citations. You’ll want to actually hyperlink inside your blogs or other content where you’re making a statement or claim that you’ve read online. Make sure you use the original source when you hyperlink.
3 SEO Tools for the Web Content Creator
SEMrush is a powerful keyword tool that allows users to optimize their sites for SEO, create intuitive pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and conduct social media and video advertising research. When it comes to using SEMrush to find keywords for your ad campaign, you’ll want to look into niche-specific long-tail keywords that apply specifically to your industry. While it’s all well and good to target a high-volume search keyword, it’s also harder to rank for these keywords, which means you may be better off focusing on a less competitive, more specific keyword phrase that allows you to rank strongly from the get-go.
Wordtracker is another keyword research tool that allows users to search multiple sources for effective keywords. This tool can help you find keywords that nobody is competing on and will be an essential tool for SEO success.
BuzzSumo is an effective tool for finding the key influencers that can help you promote your content and get it noticed by a wide audience base. It can also help you find trending content topics and take inspiration for audience related content. Although it’s not specifically SEO, developing great topic ideas and feeding off of industry leaders is every bit as important as SEO optimization.
10 Key Factors of Great SEO Content
1. Write great headers! Aside from your body content, the most important piece of content for SEO is your header. A header tells people what the piece is about, grabs reader attention and gives a general overview of the topic. To make your header as interesting as possible, include your keyword and focus on writing a header that asks a question or addresses your readers’ fears. Create headers that are irresistible and make your readers want to click; include the keyword naturally. 2. Stay away from “stuffing.” Keyword stuffing is a dangerous practice that will get you in trouble with the search engines, decreasing your site’s rank and making it harder for users to find you. Plus, it just looks spammy. So when writing your content, shoot to use keywords naturally. They should be in your header (if it’s possible to include them while still feeling organic) and they should appear a few times throughout the body content. You want your keyword density under 3% for everything you write. 3. Optimize your keywords for many channels. Keywords are important for your website, but they’re also important for social media and email. To optimize for multi-channel visibility in places like blogs, web pages and social media sites, be consistent with your keyword phrases across all the platforms you use. 4. Write good meta content. That little bit called your meta description might be more important than you realize. Think of them as your organic PPC copy; what users will see if your content ranks high enough. 2-3 sentence is all you need there, and be sure to include your main keyword. Treat your title tags like a 4-8-word advertisement for best results. 5. Be unique. All of the content you create should be unique, so you’ll want to strike a balance between curated content and original content. This is one of the best ways to optimize your site for SEO. 6. Include citations. Find and mention industry leaders throughout your content to back up your content. Google cares about your sources and to rank well you’ll want to link to industry leaders. Moz’s MozBar can help you make sure you’re using good sites; the DA (Domain Authority) score should ideally be 50 or more. However, the DA metric isn’t set in stone, so use it with judgment. Additionally, in web content you’ll want to link strategically throughout your own text back to the most important pages of your site. 7. Have high word counts. Did you know that word count can play an important part of SEO ranking? To provide the most value for your audience and rank as well as possible in SERPs, write long-form content between 1,500-2,000 words. Seek to address every question that could be raised on your topic. 8. Make sure all of your content is well- Sounds simple, but it’s crucial. Content that is filled with typos, misspellings, poor-quality links, or too many keywords will harm your SEO ranking and drive readers away. Proofread everything (or hire a proofreader). 9. Earn great links. In addition to using good links in your content, you’ll want to earn high-quality links from the outside as well. The best way to do this is to create and publish useful content that includes your keyword terms and draws social shares. Over time, the links will come. 10. Post often and consistently: Content is the #1 ranking factor for SEO and when you post often, your content gets shared more, viewed more, linked to more and helps you earn better rankings. For best results, post to your various channels several times a week and never let a blog sit unattended for long.
Copywriting vs. copyright.
Ah.
Copywriting is that wonderful trade where everyone – especially the further you live from a tech minded city – thinks you’re someone who legally protects songs. (Aka, copyright-er.)
It’s a common misconception, and one that the online copywriter has to bear often. But no, we can’t digitally protect the content of your newest album. We canwrite, though.
I’ve written up a little rant on the subject below. Enjoy. As well as the following nine truly cringe-worthy copywriting fails. I’d love to hear what you’ve seen (or heard) in the comments below!
9 Killers of Copywriting: Copywriting vs. Copyright, The Anus Burger & More
Feel free to cue up the Benny Hill theme music as you read about these ten major copywriting fails.
1. Copywriting vs. copyright, the confusion caused by people everywhere – STILL.
As someone who’s been a professional copywriter for just over half a decade as of this exact date – and it does feel longer than that – one thing that irks me the most is when people say… Oh, you do copy righting? Can you protect my buddy’s song he just wrote for infringement?
I was asked this by a cashier at a grocery store in Texas when I told him what I did. No, people. It’s writing. With a pen. I write copy. Letters. Words. Things on a page. Online. No, it’s not coding. More like blogging.
Sigh…
Can we stop the confusion already?
2. Lands’ End and the misplaced apostrophe catastrophe.
At some point in time, you have probably seen a post or two about horrible tattoo mistakes. And as we all know, tattoos are permanent.
Do you know what the marketing equivalent of a bad tattoo is? Lands’ End. Why is there an apostrophe at the end of lands instead of before the s? There have been a lot of speculation and wild theories, but Lands’ End set the record straight on their blog: it was a mistake.
A typo popped up in their first printed piece, but they could not yet afford to reprint it and correct it. Therefore, it was immortalized in ink that they could never get rid of.
Now, to be fully fair to Lands’ End, they owned up to their marketing ‘tattoo’ fail and learned to live with it – because they are all about selling to humans, and humans make mistakes. Which is great for them.
But wouldn’t it have been better if they just put that apostrophe in the right place to begin with?
3. Miller Genuine Draft and the ABC’s of spelling.
Spelling can be hard. Even when you there is a rule, like i before e, there is often also an exception, such as after c. However, that’s what spell check is for (though make sure you see number 4.) Always use it – even if you have only one or two words for your copy. Miller had an ad campaign that clearly did not get this message. That’s why we all know their Genuine Draft is a tasty contraditcion (as opposed to contradiction if you aren’t sure what I am pointing out here).
Talk about a big mistake – all they did was invert two letters – not a big deal on its own – but then they blew up that spelling mistake and put it on a billboard for everybody to see.
4. A special note on homophones from a gas company.
Homophones are words that sound alike but are pronounced differently. Think weight vs. wait, know vs. no, read vs. red, etc. Or, think duel vs. dual – the former is a fight between gentlemen usually began by slapping your opponent in the face with a white glove; the latter means two, double, etc.
Yet, a gas company had a marquee that read ‘Treat Your Vehicle to Duel Exhaust.’ Either that was an error, or there was a really strange fight a brewing.
This is especially a common problem when you think of their, they’re, and there or other very common homophones. So when you right make sure you do it write – except, to quote Willy Wonka, “Strike that. Reverse it.” – when you write make sure you do it right. See how easy it is to slip up, though?
5. McDonald’s, Hardees, you can’t rely on spellcheck.
While it is smart to use spellcheck, relying on it too heavily can cause some very embarrassing mistakes. For example, the 15 best things about public schools are probably a completely different list of things than the 25 best things about pubic schools. However, spellcheck doesn’t always realize this.
Both Hardees and McDonalds learned this lesson when they started offering the anus burger, which was not as popular as their Angus burger and for obvious reasons.
Horror of horrors. Hello, welcome to McDonalds. Would you like our butt burger special? With extra anus sauce?
As someone who actually used to work at McDonalds to make my income in nursing school, I can appreciate how that would go.
6. McDonalds Again? Marketing is all about the placement.
Where you place your copy is often just as important as what you put on your copy. For example, you probably wouldn’t want to put your billboard for a daycare up in a senior community – most of the seniors living there probably don’t have children in the daycare age range, after all.
Which is what makes this McDonalds billboard so bad – nobody wants to see that big burger displayed right next to the sign for urgent care. When we supersize it, we like to bury our head in the sand and pretend that we don’t realize the unhealthiness of our actions.
7. Macy’s, is that a fact? It better be if you put it in your copy.
While if you put any type of mistaken information in your copy it could come back to haunt you, this is especially true if you mess up your own information.
Take Macy’s, for example. In 2013, they sent out a mailer to people across the country that had a $1500 necklace on sale for $47. People were very interested in this killer deal, and Macy’s sold a lot of these necklaces.
Why would any store mark down something by $1453 or by almost 97%? It turned out that in this case, it was because of a mistake. The ad was supposed to read $497, not $47. This one small typo made a ridiculous amount of difference.
This should show you just why fact-checking is an important part of copywriting.
8. Once more, spelling matters. Right, Holiday Inn?
Many people go to Vegas for a quickie marriage. Or maybe they don’t go there for a quickie marriage, but find themselves in one when they arrive. Either way, they either have a bride already picked out when they arrive or they accidentally find one after they have been drinking too much. However, it is probably rare to find someone who went to Vegas in order to look for a cheap wife.
Yet, for some reason, a Vegas Holiday Inn thought there was a market for wives, which must be why they offered a “Free Wife” for staying there. On the other hand, maybe they meant to say Free Wi-Fi.
See? A small mistake can lead to a whole lot of confusion.
9. Think about how you word things before they balloon up on you.
Sometimes, you can technically write everything out correctly and still come off looking foolish. It’s not only spelling words correctly, it’s about wording them correctly as well. For example, take this advertisement for a balloon service.
Hopefully what they mean to say in this copy is that if the customer chooses to blow a balloon up on his or her own, it will cost 25 cents. If, on the other hand, they choose to have the store do it, it will cost 75 cents. It reads rather differently, though.
It’s 25 cents if the customer blows up, and it is 75 cents if they blow up. I’ve got to tell you: if I blow up in a store, I hope my family gets a lot more than 25 cents. On the other hand, were I to blow up the store, I would be fine with only being charged 75 cents.
10. Creative Kids Software: Proofread. And then proofread. And then think about proofreading again.
What everything boils down to here is this: please, please, please proofread. And then have someone else proofread.
You may know the difference between know and no, but that doesn’t mean you can’t accidentally write no when you mean know as you are concentrating more on how best to sell a product than on homophones. You know how to count to five, but that does not mean you will not ever start out having five points, realize one doesn’t work, remove it, and forget to change the header.
These are the types of mistakes that can happen to anybody, even the biggest, most talented copywriting grammar nerds out there. The difference, though, between the average, mistake-prone marketer and the seemingly error-free marketer is simple: one knows how to proofread and never skips this important step.
After all, nobody wants to buy kids learning software when the ad says, “So fun, they won’t even know their learning.” Just ask Creative Kids Software.
Copywriting vs. Copyright: Turn A Fail into Your Copywriting Triumph
The reason you study history in school is so you can learn from past mistakes. Well, the reason you study copywriting vs. copyright and many other major copywriting fails, is so that you can learn from them as well.
Go forth (not fourth) with your new (not knew) understanding of what not to do, and write copy that gets attention in all the right ways. And if you would like help getting your copy fail-free, then check out our copywriting services. That’s copywriting, not righting. 😉
At Express Writers, we absolutely love adapting and growing.
What we don’t like to do is stay still.
Photo credit mayawidiani.tumblr.com
So, for the past few months, we’ve been working on a lot of things behind the scenes. Here’s a recap for you on just what we’ve been up to!
I Fly Like Paper, Get High Like Planes
Our calligraphy pen point has been our foundational visual logo for years now, and we were brainstorming together on how to take it to the next level, staring at different pen points and unique illustrative representations.
I looked at my team member, COO Josh, and instantly had a thought: a paper plane shape.
Then, we decided to take things up a notch and put the paper plane in motion – pointing directly to our name, flying, and “aloft.”
We knew we loved it as soon as the idea came to mind. The final designed product was done by our own COO Josh McCoy.
Our paper plane represents the modern standards we’re continually adapting to, and a standard of onwards/upwards that we have been upholding for four years now.
Just to put into reality how and why we work hard to symbolize the onward and upward standard in the industry of content writing. We are continually honing our services, and working towards the best content agency on the planet. The paper plane fits our mission statement in a big way.
Express Writers Announcement From Julia McCoy, CEO
Posted to our @ExpWriters Instagram account, here’s an announcement about all these changes at Express Writers from Julia:
A video posted by Express Writers (@expwriters) on
I’m working on:
Books
Besides our logo rebrand, which has officially launched as of today, I’ve been working on two books: a complete guide on how to be an online content writer & a beginner’s guide to blogging.
Both will be out before Christmas, so stay tuned – look for an announcement from us with published Kindle book links.
I’ve already created our first episodes and scheduled in some super cool guests. I can’t wait to share all my content marketing knowledge and that of my guests’ with you. Here’s to growing together in content marketing!
The other day, I was poking around in my favorite SEO analytic software of choice, SEMrush, checking on our rankings. My team at Express Writers has a Guru subscription there that allows us to see detailed analytics of our site–and I mean detailed. We see a ton of keyword position data down to the most recent keyword ranking change of our site in Google, as of just an hour ago. (If you haven’t already, go check out SEMrush here.)
Well, a couple days ago I was doing my biweekly SEO audit of all of our keyword positions and pulling keyword data for new content. I was shocked to see that the positions changes mapped a huge spike: as of October 28, 302 new keyword gains. In 24 hours. And our traffic had spiked up to the most I’d ever seen: 1,251 people on one day.
What Exactly Are We Doing In Google?
Let me give you a little look at exactly how we’re getting and maintaining our positions with Google before I delve into the recent major keyword growth.
1. Content
We write and publish about 3-4 blogs on our site a week, ranging from 1,000-3,000 words each. So since 2011, we have 642 blogs published on our Wordpress site (this one makes 643):
This isn’t counting the hundreds of guest blogs I’ve placed on places like SiteProNews, Search Engine Journal, Social Media Examiner, and more.
Also, we have about 50-80 website pages, maybe 400-800 words each.
2. Traffic
So, with that insight into just how much we publish, now it’s time to see what the results are. We have some serious organic traffic. I’ve never placed a Google paid ad in all my four years of business; and never will. I believe in great content brainstorming, writing and publishing, and it is what is keeping us strong. And sometimes just this process can take me 40 hours a week. It isn’t easy, but it is thoroughly worth it.
SEMrush puts our traffic at a value of $6,800 (what we would pay if we were paying for ad clicks). We have 3,000 keywords indexed in Google, with over 100 in the top 5 positions of Google. We’re outranking a large number of our competitors in the content creation niche.
Let’s look at the graph on the right a little deeper:
Whoa!
This month we have the most site traffic we’ve ever had, with 1,251 people visiting in a single day the first week of November.
3. How We Gained 300+ Rankings In One Day
Here’s what I saw that stopped me in my tracks the other day. I clicked on Position Changes under Organic Research, in SEMrush:
See that? 302 new rankings in a single day!
Clicking on what was “new,” some of these showed we were position 11 for “modern copywriter,” #3 for “copywriting companies”, and #19 for “website content”:
The orange bar below showed we’d lost 200 keywords. But clicking on that, I saw they were mostly unrelated keywords—like “express for her,” “sprinkles icing,” and more.
Except for a few pivotal ones we’d lost a few positions on (looks like I need to refresh some old SEO content), the “lost” weren’t too bad.
How The Heck Did We Get 300+ Keywords In One Day?
I have a couple theories.
First, Google RankBrain is out. It came out two days before our rankings showed a major spike. Read my blog on RankBrain here. RankBrain is an AI system that basically could be replacing Google’s old way of doing its algorithm, and it exposed 15% of the web that Google hadn’t shed light on before. I’m sure RankBrain is showing a lot more website owners rankings they didn’t know they ever had.
RankBrain means we’ll all be able to see a whopping 15% more in analytics and positions online that our sites and content are ranking for—all the more reason to start publishing great content!
Secondly, Google has still been rolling out Panda, AND, topical trust flow has recently been making big waves (it’s replacing PageRank and focuses on reporting relevant content in higher rankings). Topical trust flow weight could be mostly likely why we lost our unrelated rankings, too. All this is probably tied into the quality of the RankBrain AI.
Lastly, we’ve been working hard on our content. Over the past month, I’ve revamped and improved our blogging and content publishing quality.
Here are just a few of the changes:
SEO audit of our blogs (I just corrected 35 “bad SEO” blogs, rewrote their meta descriptions and edited the copy, over the last 3 weeks, and took them to green SEO on the Yoast plugin)
More SEO research and keyword planningwith SEMrush for each post
Heavier research and analyzing of topics and what goes into each post
Custom drawings and illustrations, like this one, for many of our posts
At least one infographic written, designed and published per month
Re-purposing of infographics into SlideShares, RSS content to pull guest traffic
Email marketing bi-weekly that sends a blog roundup to our subscriber list
We Know What It Takes To Help You
To end this post, I’d like to emphasize that any one of our clients can see these results. We’re not only writers with pens over here. My team not only writes great SEO optimized content, but we plan it, too—and we use SEMrush! Our team includes strategists that map out monthly editorial calendars for our clients, audit websites to remove anything that could be hurting websites, and similar services.
We’ve seen content success truly happen for us – this post proves that – and we know exactly what it takes to get even a brand new website client onboard with publishing great content that gets both the eye of a reader and Google (albeit if Google, a robotic eye).
If you’re ready to get serious about content and thus, your rankings and readers, check out our Content Shop!
Big news in the Interwebz! Officially on October 26, 2015, Google released news that it has begun using an artificial intelligence page ranking system called “RankBrain.”
This AI (Artificial Intelligence) system is designed to help Google organize and categorize all of its search results and news of it is currently breaking the Internet. For those of you who are unfamiliar, here’s the skinny on the new RankBrain technology.
What is Google RankBrain?
Google RankBrain is an AI system that Google designed to assist in processing search results. The system operates by teaching itself how to complete a task and is currently being used to search the billions of pages in Google’s ranking indexes in order to find the ones that are most relevant and most valuable for a given search query.
Because the release is so new, it’s still a little unclear whether or not RankBrain is a part of the entire Google Algorithm known as Hummingbird, but sources like Search Engine Land believe that it is.
There are dozens of components that make up Hummingbird and many SEOs believe that RankBrain is simply the latest. This is fueled by the fact that Bloomberg Business reported that Google RankBrain won’t handle all searches as the algorithm would, and is only responsible for a portion of them.
According to Google, RankBrain has been live since early in the year and has been fully rolled-out for several months now. RankBrain will affect a huge number of queries and, as queries continue to roll in, the AI system will continue to become more advanced and learn to make predictions about certain search patterns.
In fact, RankBrain is already beginning to get better at predicting a page’s rank than its human counterparts: according to recent information, engineers involved in developing the software were asked to guess where various pages would be ranked according to Google’s ranking signals.
“RankBrain” makes me conjure up this image… remember those crazy Boston Dynamic dog-like bots?
While the engineers guessed correctly 70% of the time, RankBrain got it right 80% of the time. (Better than human?)
People who want to learn more about exactly how the AI properties of RankBrain function can consult this blog post (although the technology is not called RankBrain in the post).
How Does Google RankBrain Work?
The details on this are still foggy but right now the best guess is that RankBrain is used to interpret searches that are submitted to Google and to match them with pages that may not feature the exact keyword phrase that was searched for, but which are relevant nonetheless. This is an expansion on previous Google technologies that allowed the search engine to present pages that didn’t feature the exact search terms entered – so that people searching for “running shoes” would also see pages that targeted the keyword “sneakers” and so on and so forth.
Right now, Google receives over 3 billion searches on a daily basis and, in 2007, the search engine giant reported that 20-25% of those search terms were totally unfamiliar. In 2013, that number scaled down to 15%, which was still significant for such a huge machine (it amounts to about 450 million search terms each day that Google has never seen). The 15% estimation holds true today and, presumably, RankBrain is a way to refine and categorize those queries in order to deliver better results for Google users.
How RankBrain Is Involved in Google’s Ranking Signals
When it comes time to rank a webpage, Google uses a wide variety of so-called “signals” to determine how to rank the page in the index. Things like bolded words, mobile-friendly pages, and local listings are all signals that Google uses to rank a page. These signals are processed by various parts of the algorithm in order to determine which pages show up in SERPs and which do not.
According to Google, there are more than 200 big-time ranking signals used when ranking each page. Many people believe that these 200 signals then give way for up to 10,000 sub-signals. This is important to know because, seemingly out of the blue, Google is now saying that RankBrain is the third-most important ranking signal in existence right now. Although we know that this is a huge development, since we don’t know exactly how RankBrain will look in the coming months, it’s hard to tailor content to this development as it stands now.
The Future of Google RankBrain
Right now, many SEO experts believe that the presence of RankBrain may indicate a future trend toward voice searches.
Because people don’t issue voice searches the same way they issue text-based searches, search engines and marketers alike need to start adapting now.
For example, a person who wants to issue a voice search may ask “Where can I get a bagel in NYC?” while a text search may look more like “bagels NYC.” The fact that RankBrain is capable of learning, adapting to, and predicting a variety of new search queries indicates that the Google engineers may be predicting an AI system that can eventually answer basic questions and even complete easy puzzles.
This, ultimately, is an extension of a program called The Knowledge Graph, which Google released in 2012. The Knowledge Graph was Google’s way to reach toward becoming more intelligent about the connections between words. With the inception of this program, Google moved toward doing what it called searching for “things not strings.” This meant that Google went beyond searching only for information that matched a string of letters and began, instead, searching for pages that provided answers to the questions a person was probably asking through their search queries. For example, The Knowledge Graph allows searchers to enter a term like “when was Nixon born?” and get an answer complete with maps without ever specifying that you mean President Nixon.
As RankBrain becomes more established, it seems evident that the service will combine with other Google technologies, such as rich answers (more on these in a moment) to create an intuitive search experience that allows the search engine to see and predict patterns and decipher complex, long-tail queries that may not target specific keywords. RankBrain is designed to translate those queries and present the correct information to the searcher in a format that doesn’t require him or her to navigate away from the search page. This, in turn, will help decrease the number of search queries that Google can’t understand and will create a more satisfying search experience for searchers and Google engineers alike.
The Future of Search & the Increase of Rich Answers
The trend toward more information with every search has already been exhibited through Google’s rich answers. Instead of displaying a simple response when a query is issued, Google progressively upped its rates of rich answers, which is an attempt by the search engine to answer queries in a way that doesn’t require users to click through a website. Rich answers include things like snippets, charts, tables, maps, forms, sliders, and images. Consider the following example of a rich answer:
Recently, a study conducted by Stone Temple Consulting revealed that of 850,000 search queries entered, a whopping 19.45% of them result in rich answers.
This, along with the introduction of RankBrain may well point to the fact that Google as a whole is leaning toward a more intuitive, intelligent search system that helps users find exactly what they want in a single search while also picking up the slack for 450 million unfamiliar search terms.
Although the scope of RankBrain is not yet clear, it seems evident that the new program is a sliver of the big picture and that RankBrain is primed to make a big impact on search results forever.
Google isn’t exactly an impulsive company and, while the search engine giant tests many things, it only launches huge changes when it’s reasonably certain that they will make a positive impact that aligns with Google’s overall mission and projections. Additionally, the fact that RankBrain is now the third-most important ranking signal in all of Google is a huge deal and serves to further reinforce the idea that Google engineers are gearing up for big changes in the way people search the web.
So How Do We Prep for Search Changes Across all Content?
For marketers, these impending search changes have the potential to offer huge branding benefits if content is designed correctly.
For now, though, we have yet to see exactly what RankBrain will do and how it will affect queries. As always, we will keep you posted as we learn more but, for now, the same thing as always holds true: create original, high-quality content, post it often, do good keyword research, and be active on a variety of social media outlets. That is the key to search query success.
Find quality copywriting in our Content Shop to get well-written, thought-leadership content your readers will love.
Our calligraphy pen point has been our foundational visual logo for years now, and we were brainstorming together on how to take it to the next level, staring at different pen points and unique illustrative representations.
